HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.

BY W. W. WILLIAMS.

CHAPTER I.

DISCOVERY.

THE year 986 signalizes the first visitation of white men to the New World. Then it was that Herjulfson, a Norse navigator, in sailing from Iceland to Greenland, was driven by a storm to the coast of Labrador, or, as some historians claim, to that of Newfoundland. The uninviting character of the coasts of the new land deterred him from landing. What Herjulfson first saw, it was reserved for other discoverers to expore. The Norsemen returned to Greenland, and there related wonderful stories of the land they had seen, but made no further attempts at discovery.

Fifteen years later Lief Erickson, a brave and daring Icelandic captain, with mind inflamed with the fabulous accounts of his brother Norseman, resolved to extend the discovery of Herjulfson, and in the year 1001 set foot upon the shore of Labrador. He directed his course southwest along the coast, and finding the country pleasant and attractive extended his explorations, and finally reached the territory embraced within the present State of Massachusetts, where he and his companions remained one year. They proceeded along the coast bordering upon Long Island Sound, and it is claimed that the persevering band even found their way to New York harbor.

That this early discovery of American soil may not be deemed a myth, we will say, that while until recently historians have been incredulous, they now almost universally concede the fact; and by way of trustworthy information we quote from Humboldt's "Cosmos," as follows: "We are here on historical ground. By the critical and highly praiseworthy efforts of Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Copenhagen, the sagas and documents in regard to the expedition of the Norsemen to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Vinland, have been published and satisfactorily commented upon. The discovery of the northern part of America by the Norsemen cannot be disputed. The length of the voyage, the direction in which they sailed, the time of the sun's rising and setting, are accurately given. While the Caliphate of Bagdad was still flourishing America was discovered, about the year 1001, by Lief, the son of Eric the Red, at the latitude of forty-one and a half degrees north."

Nor did the explorations of these intrepid Icelanders cease with the expedition of Erickson and his companions, but in the following year 1002 Thorwald Erickson, brother to Lief, stimulated with a desire to see the new and beautiful country, made a voyage to the coast of Maine. He is said to have ended his days in the vicinity of the present town of Fall River, Massachusetts. In 1005 still another brother, Thorstein Erickson, with a band of adventurers, made a similar voyage, and was followed in 1007 by Thorfinn Karlsefne, a celebrated mariner, who sailed southward along the coast as far as Virginia.

The Norsemen must be regarded as a band of roving adventurers, who effected no settlements, and of whose discoveries but few important records have been preserved. The enthusiasm which the first discoverers excited gradually subsided, and as there were no spoils in the wilderness which might fall prey to the Norse freebooters and pirates, further occupancy of the country was not attempted. The shadows which had been for a moment dispelled began to darken over the shores of the New World, and the curtain was not again lifted for nearly five hundred years. Then came the achievement of Columbus, in the year 1492. Born of a holy faith and an inflexible purpose, it was the greatest maritime enterprise in the history of the world. He touched upon an island subsequently called San Salvador, and planting there the banner of Castile, formally claimed possession of the land in the name of Isabella, Queen of Spain. Marvelous were the results of discovery and exploration which followed. England and France vie with Spain and with each other for the mastery in the New World. The Spanish nation, led on by an insatiable thirst for gold, pushed forward her explorations in America with such energy and spirit that in less than fifty years from the time of the great discovery of

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Columbus, she had explored and laid claim to nearly one-half of the present territory of the United States. Her adventurers had visited the present States and Territories of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, the Indian Territory, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California.

France likewise made large acquisitions of American soil, though of later date. The discoveries and explorations of James Cartier, of the patriotic De Monts, of Samuel Champlain, of Marquette, of Joliet, and of the gallant La Salle, secured to France, before the close of the Sixteenth century, claims to North American territory greater than those of any other European power. At the time referred to, her sovereignty in America embraced Newfoundland, Acadia, Nova Scotia, Hudson's Bay, all the Canadas, more than half of Maine, Vermont, and New York, the whole valley of the Mississippi including its eastern tributaries—the great chain of lakes at the north and Texas at the south, as far as to the Rio Bravo del Norte.

England's dominions in America My along the Atlantic seaboard. The thirteen original colonies skirting the Atlantic from Florida to the verge of Nova Scotia were the planting of the English people, and constituted that nation's possessions up to the time of the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713. By virtue of this treaty England obtained large concessions of territory from France. The entire possessions of the Bay of Hudson and its borders; of Newfoundland, subject to the rights of France in its fisheries; and all of Nova Scotia, or Acadia, according to its ancient boundaries, passed from the dominion of France to that of England. And now the strife in America for the possession of colonial monopolies and territorial sovereignty was confined to these two great powers. France still maintained her claim to much the larger extent of territory, but her population, scattered over this immense area, numbered only eleven thousand two hundred and forty-nine persons in 1688, while that of the English colonies in the same year exceeded two hundred thousand. A contest of fifty years' duration between these two great powers for territorial acquisition in America followed, resulting in the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, by virtue of which France lost and England gained the whole country between the Allegheny mountains and the Father of Waters, except a small tract lying at the mouth of the great river. The valley of the Ohio, for whose special conquest a seven years' war had been begun, thus passed to the possession of Britain.

Strangely enough, for the success of this undertaking the English nation was mainly indebted to the very hero, who, a few years later, as Commander-in-Chief of the American armies, was engaged in wresting it in common with the territory of the whop country from British rule, in order to transfer it to the free people who should make for humanity a new existence in America. In less than a decade the dominions which England took from France were in turn taken from her, and the United States of America obtained a place among the nations of the world, and undertook the glorious work of filling a territorial continent with commonwealths.